Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  The marriage had unraveled in one domestic calamity after another, despite all of Plath’s efforts at the sort of “nesting” the fifties had taught her to want. After the birth of their daughter Frieda, the couple had searched for a larger space and finally found an idyllic country place: Court Green, a thirteenth-century thatched-roof house in Devon. Hughes, a country man raised in Yorkshire, was drawn to the land, the orchard, the history. Plath was less certain, yet her urge for domestic and poetic accomplishments convinced her that here she could raise the five children she wanted, and spend mornings in a study facing an ancient graveyard. Cooking, gardening, and writing, she would inherit the English history of which her husband was already an heir. In the summer of 1961, the two poets and their baby daughter moved to Court Green, where they would live together for a brief fourteen months.

  In the mornings, Hughes took care of Frieda so that Plath could write. In the afternoons, he wrote while she made excursions into town with the baby or sewed curtains for the house. Then, on January 17, 1962, she gave birth to their son Nicholas, at first “blue and glistening” in an alarming way, then with a “handsome male head.” After a difficult labor that she recounted in detail in her journal, she noted that now, “It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise.”9

  And indeed, the births of both her babies had been not just personal but poetic gifts for Plath. In a break with modernist tradition, she began writing intense maternal poems to her children. Historically, this was unprecedented. Fathers since the Renaissance had written to sons, and in the nineteenth-century sentimental “poetesses” had penned obsequies for dead babies. But Plath was composing sophisticated works in a new genre. Ariel deliberately opened with “Morning Song,” a beautiful aubade for Frieda. Beginning “Love set you going like a fat gold watch,” the piece celebrates not the sexual love that set the baby going but maternal love, as Plath describes the age-old scene of a mother nursing her infant at dawn.

  One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

  In my Victorian nightgown.

  Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.10

  Later, in “Nick and the Candlestick,” another nursing poem, she records waking at night to feed her child, but contextualizes the scene of love with a world of suffering, in which the possibility of nuclear annihilation hovers over the baby in whom “the blood blooms clean,” noting that “The pain / You wake to is not yours.”11

  Within a few months of Nicholas’s birth, the “rightness & promise” of the “Christmas Eve” scene the night he was born had disintegrated. Though there were wonderful moments—for instance, when the Court Green garden bloomed with masses of daffodils, about which both poets wrote—the loneliness of country life, together with the arduousness of caring for two little children while keeping house in an old manor without central heating or a modern kitchen, exhausted the pair. “We can hardly see each other over the mountains of diapers and demands of babies,” she told her mother.12 Even before the melodrama that overtook them in the summer of 1962, the marriage had begun to fray.

  The story of what happened next is well known to historians of twentieth-century poetry: how Assia and David Wevill, to whom the Hugheses had sublet their London apartment, came for a weekend, with the glamorous Assia having already confided to a colleague that she planned to “seduce Ted.” (Sylvia’s kitchen calendar shows she served corn chowder, beef stew, and gingerbread for dinner that night.) How Ted fell for Assia right away. How Sylvia, with what her husband called her “death ray quality,” intuited that something was wrong. How Ted sent Assia a love note, how Assia responded affirmatively with a symbolic blade of grass in an envelope. How the lovers met and steamily copulated in various hotel rooms. How Assia called Ted, speaking in a pseudo-masculine voice, and Sylvia, picking up the phone before he could get to it, tore the black machine out of the wall “by its roots”—so that it would be impossible for months to reconnect the phone service. How her mother, who was visiting for a month, saw so much marital discord that Sylvia was horrified. How she forced Ted out but sought for his return. How Frieda, witnessing her parents in tears, exclaimed, “Mummy sad, daddy sad!”13

  In August 1962, Ted left for London, where he would scrounge for living spaces from friends before permanently exiting Court Green in October. Sylvia stayed in Devon, alone with two little children, a large house, a garden, and an orchard of “seventy trees / Holding their gold-ruddy balls / In a thick gray death-soup.”14 Abandoned and insomniac, she depended on barbiturates for sleep, then woke at five in the morning, when the medication wore off, and went straight to her desk—the elmwood plank that Ted and her brother Warren had polished for her—and began writing the poems of Ariel. “Have managed a poem a day before breakfast,” she wrote her mother. “All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me.”15

  She was and was not the person she had been. Her scrupulous kitchen calendar still recorded meals; she was still keeping bees, cooking, mothering. But now she began to take riding lessons and to cast about for other options—Ireland? Spain? London? She searched frantically for nannies and confided to her mother and her brother how anxious she was. And yet, despite her panic—or perhaps, more accurately, because of it—the amazing poems continued to arrive at “that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.”16

  And now they were poems boasting of an achieved new self, a self, to be sure, that was being constructed on the page. Significantly, that re-created paper-self was a feminist, even if its author had not read Simone de Beauvoir. Finally she cast off old stereotypes in poem after poem—from “Fever 103°” to “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Stings.” Especially in the last of these works, written on October 6, 1962, when Hughes was at Court Green to pack his things, she insisted, as she bent to her beekeeping, that “I am no drudge / Though for years I have eaten dust / And dried plates with my dense hair.”17

  This was the domesticity that had almost “choked” her, not only in the literal dust of Court Green but in the figurative dust of its long past and in both the literal and figurative dust she had inhaled as she kept house for her husband, typing his poems, cooking his meals, washing his dishes. No, she decided at last, “I / have a self to recover, a queen”:

  Now she is flying

  More terrible than she ever was, red

  Scar in the sky, red comet

  Over the engine that killed her–

  The mausoleum, the wax house.18

  The mausoleum: the tomb of history in which women are imprisoned? The mausoleum of her imagination in which her dead father, a professor of entomology (author of Bumblebees and Their Ways), was still somehow alive, though he had died decades before? And the wax house: not just the literal wax house of the bees, but the false house of fifties domesticity, forever beckoning in the pages of the Ladies’ Home Journal? Or Court Green itself, that fantasy of English history, in which she was buried alive with her two children, while her husband cavorted in London with his mistress and his literary friends?

  A week later, on October 12, 1962, Plath wrote “Daddy,” perhaps the most famous of her poems. Apparently straightforward and bouncy as a nursery rhyme, the piece was initially seen by its author as bleakly funny. Shortly after writing it, Plath read it to a friend, and the two burst into gales of laughter.19 And indeed “Daddy” is revisionary comic verse, just as it is a revisionary nursery rhyme of the sort Plath was regularly reading to Frieda. At the same time, though, in a remarkable literary sleight of hand, it is a work of feminist theory, the major one that Plath would produce in her short lifetime—and as such it looked forward to writings by Plath’s contemporary Adrienne Rich and by Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics was to appear in 1970.

  To be sure, when the poem was first published in the States, it was read by some as a personal attack on the poet’s dead father, Otto Plath, the professor who had died of gangrene when she was o
nly 8, and to a lesser extent as an attack on her husband, Ted Hughes. Casting the German-born “daddy” as a Nazi and his frightened daughter as “a bit of a Jew,” Plath threaded imagery of Hitler’s Germany through the piece: “Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. . . . your Luftwaffe . . . Panzer-man. . . . Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through.”20 To the BBC, she explained before reading the poem on the air that it was “a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex.”21 But her first American audience, in particular, was having none of this. When “Daddy” appeared in Ariel, the poem was singled out for violent rebukes from critics who imagined that Plath was actually accusing her father of being a Nazi.

  In fact, throughout the poem Plath brilliantly conflated her biological father with a patriarchal Father, with God the Father, with Germany’s “Führer,” and, eventually, with her black-jacketed husband, Ted Hughes. Analyzing the (sometimes self-willed) abjection of women in patriarchal culture (“Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you”), she outlined her rebellion against “daddy’s” diabolical system, a rebellion that simultaneously looks back on childhood and animates childhood.

  To begin with, she remembers being merely a foot, “poor and white, / Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”—a daddy’s girl experiencing herself as no more than a humble body part inertly enclosed in the black shoe of the Father. Worse still, she recalls her inability to speak even the most primordial words of his language: “It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich”—even the simplest word for self, for “I” in German, became an unpronounceable “Ich” that was also icky.22 And the repeated, pounding rhythm of “Ich, ich, ich, ich” goose-steps across the page like a Nazi soldier.

  But this poem is powered by ambivalence, for the angry speaker confesses that, abandoned by the real father when he died, and implicitly too by the deific Father, she tried to die “And get back, back, back to you,” as Plath herself did in her suicide attempt at the age of 20. When she was rescued (“they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue”), her only recourse was to “[make] a model of you”: a husband whose fascistic charisma replicated the allure of the patriarchal Father, reviving the daughter’s thralldom to his “Marble-heavy” command.23

  In the end, then, Plath—or, shall we say, “Daddy’s girl”?—reimagines both the daunting “daddy” and the husband who is his clone as a vampire whom she must murder in just the way that the Transylvanian villagers killed Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel—and in numerous popular films:

  There’s a stake in your fat black heart

  And the villagers never liked you,

  They are dancing and stamping on you.

  They always knew it was you.

  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.24

  At one point this poem was so significant for Plath that she thought she would title her new manuscript Daddy.

  Eventually, though, after Hughes left for London, Plath’s riding skills improved and she began to spend early mornings cantering across the moors on a horse named Ariel, whose liberatory speed she celebrated in a dazzling poem. As the piece, also named “Ariel,” begins, she and her horse are standing on the edge of a field in the darkness just before dawn. But their “Stasis in darkness” is quickly disrupted by a gallop toward the sunrise, as she and her horse seem to meld into one speeding creature. Finally, in an orgasmic climax, the journey lets her free herself from her past, “unpeel— / Dead hands, dead stringencies,” like a “White / Godiva” as she plunges swift as an arrow toward the rising sun, which is both the “red / Eye”—like the burning eye of a god? or like a regenerated I?—and “the cauldron of morning”: a kind of celestial kettle in which the fierce light of a new day coils and boils.25

  Is she, then, galloping toward rebirth at the break of day? But what about the sound of that last phrase? Can it be mistaken for “cauldron of mourning”? Previously in the poem, after all, she has noted that the dew “flies / Suicidal” toward the sun. Is she a drop of dew, doomed to evaporate in the heat she approaches, or is she, as she declares, “an arrow” seeking a target?26 Given the intense alternation between braggadocio and despair in these late works, it is hard to decide.

  In any case, the name Ariel was crucial to her: she had always been obsessed with Shakespeare’s exploration of father–daughter love in The Tempest, whose governing spirit is a sprite called Ariel. And she knew that in Hebrew Ariel signifies “God’s lioness.” Facsimiles of the manuscript she left on her desk that bleak February morning show how she wavered between two titles: one, “Daddy,” that looked back—perhaps with anger, perhaps with laughter—to the dependency of girlhood, and the other that flew into the future as Ariel, not only a raging lioness but a spirit freed by the patriarchal Prospero into autonomous selfhood or, perhaps, autonomous self-immolation.27

  Finally, as we know, Ariel defeated Daddy, at least on the page, where Plath the poet struck out “Daddy” and replaced it with “Ariel.” But for Plath the woman, torn between the ideology of the fifties that had shaped her and the feminism of the sixties that she was inventing for herself, the choice was not so easy. In December, she moved to London, where she could have all the literary company she wanted, live in a stylish flat (“in Yeats’s house!”), and buy new clothes with a check from her Smith College patroness, Olive Higgins Prouty. “I . . . feel and look like a million,” she wrote her mother in one of her feverish late letters. “Got a Florence-Italy blue and white velvet overblouse, a deep brown velvet Italian shirt, black fake-fur toreador pants, a straight black velvet skirt and metallic blue-and-black French top.”28

  And, too, in the days before she took her life, Plath saw her estranged husband repeatedly. One snowy evening they walked around Soho Square, as she begged, according to one of his poems, “Tell me / We shall sit together this summer / Under the laburnum,” the ornamental tree (sometimes called the “golden chain tree”) that sheltered part of the garden at Court Green.29 He reassured her and took her to his flat, where she wept and screamed all night—screamed so loud that the upstairs neighbors knocked through the ceiling for quiet. In some part of herself, she realized the golden chain of the marriage was broken.

  Then the next day she told him to leave the country, that she wanted to be on her own.

  On February 4, she wrote to her American psychiatrist: “I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it.”30 And then, a week later, as if joining the world of “Daddy”—of “Dachau, Ausch­witz, Belsen”—she put her head in the oven and turned on the gas, entering the history she had struggled so hard to resist.

  ADRIENNE RICH AS A CULTURAL DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

  More than a decade after her daughter’s death, Aurelia Schober Plath put together a carefully pruned collection of Sylvia’s “intimate correspondence with her family from the time she entered Smith College,” in an effort to prove that the author of “Daddy” had a happier childhood than her posthumously published poems would suggest. When it appeared in print as Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, the volume carried a glowing blurb on its back cover: three sentences from Adrienne Rich, Plath’s near contemporary: “Finally now, young women writers can cease to identify with the apparent self-destroyer in Sylvia Plath and begin to understand the forces she had to reckon with. What comes across in the letters is a survivor, who knew that to be a writer means discipline, indefatigable commitment, and passion for hard work. By no means all is told here, but the features emerge of a real, not a mythic, woman artist.”

  Always an astute reader, Rich discerned in the letters not just what was there but what had been cut: not only the forces Plath had to “reckon with” but the force in her that deeply wanted to survive the wreckage of her dream of marriage. Rich grasped these personal and cultural dynamics because they were forces that had animated her own career from childhood onward.

  Born in 1929, a few years before
Plath, Rich also grew up in an academic household, though one that was far more affluent than Plath’s home and that, besides, featured two parents instead of a struggling widow. Her father, Arnold Rich, was a secular Jew and a distinguished professor of medicine; her Gentile mother had been trained as a concert pianist. A dutiful child, Rich was homeschooled for some years by her mother, who taught her to play Bach and Mozart, and, more overwhelmingly, by her father, who set daily literary tasks for her and her younger sister. But beneath an obedient veneer, the poet had begun to rebel. From her father’s perspective, she was “satisfyingly precocious,” but like Plath she was “groping for . . . something larger” by the time she began her studies at Radcliffe.31 The forces she had to reckon with? As in Plath’s case, they were the dynamics of the fifties that preached not only feminine but writerly decorum.

  And in fact, Rich’s early work, like much of Plath’s, is expertly crafted but often evasive and glitteringly impersonal in a way that was popular at the time. When she was just 21, her first collection of poems, A Change of World, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, an award for which Plath had fruitlessly yearned. The introduction to her book, written by the masterful W. H. Auden, was strikingly appropriate to an era marked by the “feminine mystique.” Rich’s poems, declared Auden, were “neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them.”32 A few years later, in patronizing words on her next volume, The Diamond Cutters, Randall Jarrell sounded the same trivializing note, observing that the author of the book seems “to us a sort of princess in a fairy tale.”33 But yes, Rich herself, writing what she was to call her “praised and sedulous lines” to please her professorial father, did indeed produce some poems that were “neatly and modestly dressed.”34

  The princess-poet’s first act of overt rebellion was to marry “a divorced graduate student” from an observant Jewish family.35 (Her parents were so disapproving that they refused to come to the wedding, held at Hillel House on the Harvard campus.) Then she began to write “ ‘modern,’ ‘obscure,’ ‘pessimistic’ poetry,” and eventually she had “the final temerity to get pregnant.”36 Visiting Cambridge in 1958, Sylvia Plath discerned what Auden, Jarrell, and perhaps even Rich’s father had failed to grasp. In her journal she described Rich, with some respect, as “all vibrant short black hair, great sparkling black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella: honest, frank forthright & even opinionated” (italics ours).37 At the same time, Plath was fiercely competitive toward this contemporary whom she rightly understood to be the only woman of her generation who shared her drive and talent. “Who rivals?” she asked herself once in her journal. “Most close, Adrienne Cecile Rich,” she responded.38